1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to spoken dialog systems and more specifically to a system and method of providing a modular approach to creating the dialog manager that handles context shifts in a spoken dialog service.
2. Introduction
The present invention relates to spoken dialog systems and to the dialog manager module within such a system. The dialog manager controls the interactive strategy and flow once the semantic meaning of the user query is extracted. There are a variety of techniques for handling dialog management. Several examples may be found in Huang, Acero and Hon. Spoken Language Processing, A Guide to Theory, Algorithm and System Development, Prentice Hall PTR (2001), pages 886-918. Recent advances in large vocabulary speech recognition and natural language understanding have made the dialog manager component complex and difficult to maintain. Often, existing specifications and industry standards such as Voice XML and SALT (Speech Application Language Tags) have difficulty with more complex speech applications.
Development of a dialog manager continues to require highly-skilled and trained developers. The process of developing, generating, testing and deploying a spoken dialog service having an acceptably accurate dialog manager is costly and time-consuming. As the technology continues to develop, consumers further expect spoken dialog systems to handle more complex dialogs. As can be appreciated, higher costs and technical skills are required to develop more complex spoken dialog systems.
When developing spoken dialog systems, one of the most tedious transitions to encode in a system is a context shift. A context shift occurs when a user interacting with a system changes the context of a dialog. An example may be instructive. Assume a user is interacting with a spoken dialog service for banking services. The user desires to obtain an account balance. As part of this interaction, the service would prompt the user for an account number. While the user is in the process of providing an account number, the user may say “I also want to transfer funds”. In this regard, the user changes the context from receiving an account balance to making a fund transfer. These kinds of transitions are difficult to predict and code in a spoken dialog service.
Given the improved ability of large vocabulary speech recognition systems and natural language understanding capabilities, what is needed in the art is a system and method that provides an improved development process for the dialog manager in a complex dialog system. Such improved method should simplify the development process, decrease the cost to deploy a spoken dialog service, and utilize reusable components. These reusable components also need to be more efficient in handling context shifts in a spoken dialog with a user.